typicalplan = planning |
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VLAANDEREN 2002 NO-SPACE ODYSSEY. |
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Due to a government decision the small Flemish polder village of Doel will finally yield to the expansion of the port of Antwerp. About a thousand inhabitants will be forced out of their houses and distributed over new suburban developments. A village community with a rich history is destroyed.
By relocating to low-density neighbourhoods a bad thing begets worse: the space-consuming port expansion is multiplied by housing the former village dwellers in suburban villa’s.
Can this tragedy instead become an opportunity?
If destruction of the village is unavoidable for economic reasons, isn’t it our duty to offer the inhabitants a real alternative?
The port expansion is accompanied by the abandonment of the old small-scale port facilities near the centre of Antwerp. The gradual dissociation of city and port leaves a barren no man’s land in its wake. Would it not be self-evident to relocate a village destroyed by harbour expansion to the scorched earth left in the wake of this capitalist bulldozer?
Instead of being fragmented by the destructive powers of the port, the village would reappear densified, more concentrated in the eye of the storm.
Instead of causing fragmentation, the disappearance of the village becomes an opportunity for a research into new forms of high-density housing.
An investigation into high-rise dwellings:
+ Can an apartment building with a surplus of shared common spaces become a vertical village?
+ Is not the flaw of modernist high-rise planning to situate public space next to the building, thus minimizing the possibilities of interaction and interweaving between public and private space? (The so-called landscape on the untouched ground plane beneath the “pilotis” is just greenery as scenery.)
+ What if circulation spaces were inflated so they function as real transitory semi-public zones within the building?
+ What if corridors became streets?
The old village becomes a blueprint for the creation of multiple transitory levels of privacy. But whereas the structure of the old village meant that houses looked into each other in the front and at the back, here the inhabitants are offered an unhindered view of the river at one side and its hinterland to the other. Public streets are up- and downwards. A true vertical village.
type: graduation project Master of Architecture, St.-Lucas Institute of Architecture, WENK (Brussels, Belgium)
location: Antwerp, Belgium
year: 1999
architect: Hans Leo Maes / TypicalPlan